Three Essays on Technique, the Artificial and the New Human

This chapter brings together three short articles, written at different times, which have not been published in English. The first essay, “The living and the artificial”, gives an account of the convergence of two trends: the production of artificial objects which mimic human behaviour and the artificial programming of human behaviour. Both are outcomes of Western culture and of a conception of the object-world of a transcendent subject. Both move in the direction of an object which is artificially alive and to the artificially mechanised man. This, involving the “materialization of the spirit”, threatens to do away with the “transcendent subject” and annihilate humanity. The second essay, “Towards the new man”, examines the issue of technological domination and the subsequent alteration and decline of values. This “absurd” replacement of models of behaviour by modes of operation, by pseudo-values, by technocracy, by the absence of decision-making and engagement, of post-humanity, raises the prospect of a “new man”, he who will live and consume, a passive and patient being, lacking agency, indecisive, without values. The third essay, “Technique as argument”, reflects on the paradox of our living in a world which is produced by a specific type of “magic” – technique –, but in which at the same time the faith in that magic is profoundly undermined. This is because we no longer believe that the operation of technique is due to the “wisdom” of the “pure science” which sustains it, and also because the potency of the novelty it may bring has been used to maintain the existing structures of a hollowed out civilizational project. Today technique is a mere argument, one which is apparently progressive but in fact conservative. Are we able to read into these three essays of Flusser’s an appeal for a technique which might offer us a true vision of the new?